Multiple elastic scattering of electrons in condensed matter

Since the 1940s, much attention has been devoted to the problem of accurate theoretical description of electron transport in condensed matter. The needed information for describing different aspects of the electron transport is the angular distribution of electron directions after multiple elastic collisions. This distribution can be expanded into a series of Legendre polynomials with coefficients, A_l. In the present work, a database of these coefficients for all elements up to uranium (Z=92) and a dense grid of electron energies varying from 50 eV to 5000 eV has been created. The database makes possible the following applications: (i) accurate interpolation of coefficients A_l for any element and any energy from the above range, (ii) fast calculations of the differential and total elastic-scattering cross sections, (iii) determination of the angular distribution of directions after multiple collisions, (iv) calculations of the probability of elastic backscattering from solids, and (v) calculations of the calibration curves for determination of the inelastic mean free paths of electrons. The last two applications provide data with comparable accuracy to Monte Carlo simulations, yet the running time is accelerated by several orders of magnitude. All of the above applications are implemented in the Fortran program MULTI_SCATT. Numerous illustrative runs of this program are described. Despite a relatively large volume of the database of coefficients A_l, the program MULTI_SCATT can be readily run on personal computers.